The days when books were sold by word of mouth or via discreet ads in newspapers or magazines are long gone. Audiovisual trailers for books – in the same style as those for blockbuster movies – are now an essential part of any marketing campaign for a big-hitting new novel.

They've only been around for a short time – the first one was for Christine Feehan's paranormal romance novel Dark Symphony in 2003 – but they have just acquired the ultimate seal of pop-cultural approval: their own awards ceremony.

The US publisher Melville House held the inaugural Moby awards recently for the best – and worst – in the book trailer industry, held in true awards-style with a glittering red carpet evening at a New York hotel. But this is no corporate back-slapping exercise: the Moby awards have a nicely arch flavour to them. There's an award for Trailer Least Likely to Sell the Book, for example, which went to Sounds of Murder by Patricia Rockwell. And you can see why it was a runaway winner: a little over a minute of shaky footage of the cover of the book accompanied by a rather disconcerting gravelly voiceover.

Dennis Cass, author of Head Case, won Best Performance by an Author, beating a tough field that included Thomas Pynchon (possibly because the latter appeared in voiceover only), while the wonderfully animated trailer by the New Zealand Book Council for Maurice Gee's Going West won the Best Big Budget/Big House Book Trailer gong.

The rise of video-sharing websites such as YouTube has meant that huge audiences can be reached for literary trailers, at a fraction of the cost of buying airtime on TV or screen-time in cinemas. That isn't, though, to say that there have never been forays on to the small screen to plug new books. Robert McCrum, the Observer's former literary editor, remarked on the practice in 2006, on the occasion of much pomp and circumstance for the TV ads for Gautam Malkani's novel Londonstani. McCrum didn't think it would catch on, certainly for new novelists: "My bet is that TV trails for books will be a passing fad – like tube advertising. The awkward truth is that this sort of thing only works if you spend a lot of money – and that's just what British publishers don't have."

That didn't stop some attempts, though, notably the short-and-sweet ad for James Patterson's thriller I, Alex Cross. And in a response to McCrum's column, the commentator Danuta Kean mentioned others, including "Penguin's creepy treatment of a Nicci French novel a few years back."

Given the cost of such productions, though, the internet's likely to remain where it's at for book trailers in the short term. Anyone spotted any particularly good – or desperately bad – ones out there? And has anyone bought a book purely on the strength of a trailer?